If we assume that your claim that a lot of people have not actually been infected by SARS-CoV-2 or one of its many scariants which is driving the increase in infections among the vaxxed and boosted to the hilt crowd, then ...
It could be that the excess mortality is a result of those people, especially the older ones dying from those infections. After all, even rhinoviruses can kill older people and those with a weak immune system.
How would we determine whether any excess mortality is a result of SARS-CoV-2's spike protein (and it's many scariants) or as a result of the enormous numbers of Spike proteins caused by the #ClotShot or because they watched too much TV about how dangerous the scariants are and just up and died suddenly?
So, when it comes to the UK after the ONS stopped publishing updates, that's the big question. Actually I guess I could slog over to the UKHSA and see if there's anything in there for "Covid deaths." Been a while since I looked.
Based on the early PCR tests having the cycle thresholds cranked way up it seems likely that the cases back then were way overstated, which lends credence to your claims that not many were actually infected.
However, it is known that many in the West (and probably elsewhere) are vitamin D deficient, and so they probably could not mount an immune defense even if boosted to the moon.
How can we estimate how many of those 'cases' were real cases. Should we just assume that only 10% were?
I don't think the cases were inflated. You've got 102 million for the official US count, so still way less than the whole population - I think that's an undercount. And both the Cleveland Clinic studies have shown that people who previously PCR+ with the cycles set to whatever they have been from 2020 to present, are the ones least likely to PCR+ going forward. So there are no or very few false positives in those studies. Having a PCR+ can't confer a property of being less likely to PCR+ if was just a false positive in the first place.
So, the original definition of a case was someone with symptoms.
With inflated cycle threshold counts, how many of those with a PCR+ were actually a case instead of someone who was challenged with the virus but fought it off?
Having said that however, given that there is evidence that the majority of people in the West are D3 insufficient ... perhaps 50+ percent were actually cases.
Am I understanding this correctly. What you are suggesting is that the effect may well be that large numbers of the vaccinated had not actually been exposed to whatever scariant of concern they were looking at prior to being vaccinated, and so the effect could simply be that they did not have immunity.
I do not know if I have ever had any of the scariants because I have never bothered being tested and I have never had the ClotShots either.
That's likely true for lots of people. In the BA.5 summer survey paper even among people who self-selected to take a survey, reported previous infections were middling. Probably because of regardless of injection status there is a contingent that will never test, like me as well.
The Peters "Died Suddenly" feels like controlled opposition with an attempt at Google washing the results. Ha
The MSM avoiding the topic while scientists are desperately (sub or consciously) trying to cover their asses by finding an excuse (long covid) that reduce their shame in pushing these untested products on 5 billion people.
I seem to rememeber in 2020, all strokes, clots, and heart attacks were all covid related. Haven't looked back at that Fear Porn data but that was my first "ohhhh wait a minute moment."
So the reason the MSM has been pushing so many explanations for these sudden deaths and health issues other than long covid, being it looks bad for the vaccines that were supposed to stop infection, then at least reduce symtpoms, and final Hail Mary of reducing Long Covid?
Even living in what appears to be a Post Modernist hellscape with "truth teams", blaming Long Covid (which has yet to be defined, has overlap with vaccine injuries, probably related to that pesky spike protein factory called your internal organs) seems like what the Blue Team? would be using as cover, but doesnt appear to be what is being done from keeping an eye on the MSM garbage. Maybe this is a product of Big Pharma advertising dollars or they are just waiting for the "Long Covid vaccine"? Pfizer has that new heart tissue repair mrna vaccine coming out.......
I admit I dont follow the Long Covid studies. Maybe its just my take on the world, but studies relating to pharmaceutical products tend to get their funding from sources with incentives to get results that paint their industry in the best light. They have their conclusions, just gotta design that study. If it doesnt work out, bury it.
My friend works for DOD contractor who won a bid proposal to use machine learning with a prepared NIH dataset. They were told to design a model that will show the covid vaccines reduce long covid. The company with the best model that shows less long covid with the vaccinated, will win more funding and continue the project.
Some people will never believe these vaccines are dangerous and a terrible idea no matter what studies are published.
Demanding receipts is good. People will still be told not to believe their lying eyes.
Sorry Brian! After 3 years, I am experiencing peak skepticism.
I mean I do think the MSM bit is some sort of op. But I wonder if it's just a float to try to gauge response. Exactly as Peters' "Died Suddenly" might have been. The MSM and our reality TV governments have certainly gone quiet on the Long Covid issue but medical media hypes it a lot. Studies hype it a lot. This lady blames a child's stroke on the virus https://twitter.com/CorinneMeadow20/status/1613959110575226880 and cites https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887899422002107 which doesn't even show an increase in strokes vs trend in the "pandemic" era (cuts off right before teen vaccine rollout, conveniently)
Hmm....after reading so many of your Substacks, "Statistics Lie" and all that....I wonder why even bother with this? Just seem to be explaining away results of anything and everything.
As for "Everything is catch up effect", out of all the people I know and have discussed this with (lets say 100 people),
I can name maybe 3 people who didnt already have covid before their initial booster. They mostly likely had covid before but didnt test (many of my vaccinated friends in 2021 believed they couldn't get covid so no need to test) or had been hiding in their homes and had no children.
Max anecdote is friend with 5 doses and had covid 4 times.
Meanwhile I have witnessed two heart attacks in college age vaccinated men during cycling races. Two vaccinated friends parents have died from heart attacks. My other friends dad had to get pace maker installed after arythmia with no history of heart disease. Step mothers thyroid has completey shutdown and now needs an MRI for some other unknown issue. I could go on and on and on.
Not a single unvaccinated friend or family member has had any new health issues pop up in past 3 yrs after having covid including my mother who had just recovered from breast cancer 6 months before contracting original covid strain early 2020.
Find me that vaccinated vs unvaccinated study for this vaccine or any vaccine for that matter and maybe it would be clear. Apparently those statistics would be lies as well?
When suddenly all these deaths and medical issues are being blamed on global warming, cold weather, hot weather, holiday heart, referee whistles, indoor gas stoves, tylenol, and NOT covid or long covid, you know we are over the target.
And yet here were these households in the Netherlands surveyed during Delta and BA.1 in which the injected tested positive less. And surveys are closer to anecdotes, which I like to base my picture of reality on. So there's anecdotes in both directions as far as counts of infections.
Humans basically form groups and share perspective and come up with a "bid" on what strategies and policies should be tried. Good, great. I think "a new study says X!" is basically a mind-virus that breaks this process down. So I think spreading cynicism about "a new study says" is an end in itself. Ok, you are telling me about a study, did you actually look at the details. Demand receipts.
I find your health downturn anecdotes plausible. I do believe the injections are maiming and killing even if the statistics don't reflect it yet. I don't think there is a "we" that's over the target. The "Long Covid kills" team is deeply deeply convinced. They have a "new study says X" for that belief every day of the week.
I know people injured and killed by the shots, maybe 15, of whom only one of my sisters reported it to VAERS. But among my circle of friends and family, most of whom are vaxxed, I'm not seeing multiple covid infections. By now they've all caught up with us unvaxxed: this happened last summer, so, omicron catch up. But only my unvaxxed husband, eldest son and self have had it more than once. If all I had were my own data, I wouldn't be able to say the shots caused worse susceptibility to infection and symptomatic covid. But the side effects, that's a different story.
Dazed how? I thought it was nice to have confirmation of misclassification, though not surprising. He misses the result of synthesizing negative real time infection efficacy with apparent equal representation in "Covid hospitalizations" (if the vaxxed are getting all their catchup infections right now then it wouldn't really mean anything if "Covid hospitalizations" were disproportionately vaccinated).
The sloppy categorization of the data bothered me. It seemed like a pile of God-knows-what that could lead to any conclusion. Irritated the hell out of me.
Oh, agree as far as that. Like all the stuff about "look at these disappearing Canada stats" turns me away for the same reason. I don't want to see literal data dadaism.
I've been reading and analyzing your recent "catch-up effect" posts. Based upon the studies you've analyzed and the arguments you've made, I'm convinced of what you're saying (by in large). However, it does seem that the vaccines do have some sort of "negative efficacy," especially among the boostered. And the evidence for that is my anecdotal observations: the vaccinated (many of whom previously had Covid) are the ones who got really sick during these past few variant waves over the past few months; whereas the unvaccinated have been fine (worse case scenario: scratchy throat or slight congestion).
In other words, there is no "catch-up effect" going on with the vaccinated I know: not only did Covid already get them, it got them a second (or third) time. What is more, the severity of their subsequent infection was worse than the first time.
In short, your "catch-up effect" theory/model makes sense and is likely to be valid. Yet, it's not comporting with what I'm seeing in my circles.
I definitely suspect the vaxxed are having exacerbated infections. Like both the teacher and the "Long Omicron" guy in my Tolerance Maims post.
For raw negative infection efficacy I see a lot of anecdotes in both directions in substack comments (eg, unvaccinated with 2nd Omicrons, though very rarely).
One thing to be aware of is that Omicron increased "breakthrough reinfections" two different ways: by causing reinfections, and by increasing first "breakthrough" infections. So definitely the trend will be up. But that might not speak to whether both unvaxxed and vaxxed are equally naturally immune (ie have had Omi once yet), I think it's still not balanced.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.03.22284042v1 shows repeat-positives in N3C, which is the closest thing to a decent monitoring system in the US, using a 60-day window instead of the usual 90. So you can see (Fig 1) that there's some "Omicron reinfections" (green and lavender) in there, but nothing crazy compared to the initial spike (which is a good yardstick to account for whatever the underreporting factor is).
Out of 1.6 million initial positives there's only 2176 double-re-positives (supplemental). Though URF is unknowable. Vaccine status isn't given but Blacks are overrepresented in reinfections and reinfections + hospitalization. Asians not. Seems nonsuggestive of negative infection efficacy.
Right. But as the authors admit, one of said study's limitations is that it did not (because it was infeasible to) include home tests. Consequently, the number of reinfections may be (likely are) much higher.
My case illustrates that limitation. I (unvaxxed) had omicron last January (tested positive with home test). This past August-October, many of my vaxxed friends and coworkers were really sick with Covid (most for the second time). After frequently being exposed to them, I experienced some slight congestion and felt a little "off," but nothing that bothered me--something that, prior to 2020, I wouldn't even have paid any attention to. For shits and giggles, I took a home covid test: it was positive. So, apparently, I had a reinfection, but had I never taken the test, I never would have known I had an infection. Or, perhaps it wasn't an infection: I simply had the antigen showing up in my nostril, but my immune system kept it from advancing to an infection?
Which raises the question (or point) I'm trying to get at: how can we accurately determine efficacy (whether negative or positive) when we can't accurately know the true number of reinfections (because people are taking home tests or not even testing at all). That's why I keep come back to the need to add some sort of caveat to your "catch-up-effect" model. While it is probably correct and viable, there seems to be some sort of negative efficacy effect also going on, which cannot be captured in or modeled from the data, where the vaccinated, who previously had covid, are not as well as the unvaccinated who previously had covid.
I am sure antigen testing increased URF - but it also might have increased (unmeasured) "testing," so it could be a bit of a wash. What I propose regarding Hadley, et al. is that Omicron created a pool of first-timers roughly as big as all previous first-timers (though this isn't broken down in the study), so if there were no Omicron immunity then green should resemble the other colors in AUC, given that those others colors are already a product of whatever the URF for reinfection is. But yes, certainly a dramatic increase in N3C's URF because of the at-home era is possible. So we can't be sure.
At the same time, it is not the only system that has failed to detect reinfections (regardless of vax status). It's one more broken banjo in the symphony.
LOL! That pretty much sums it up. I'm on board with what you're saying.
A bit off topic, but in case you haven't yet seen this, Paul Offit thinks "imprinting" is why the bivalent vaccines aren't increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780
"The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2."
Appreciate the work you do and your interaction with all of us. Hope the pinky heals up.
Oh yes - but funnily, he hinges that on the two earliest neutralization papers which haven't been consistently replicated. So either he wrote that back in October and it's just now being published, or he is cherry-picking (it's very weird that he's been so anti-booster given his background as America's number one vax hawk, but maybe he had a bad reaction and this is his lame way of changing heart). I am going to briefly mention Topol's review of the results when I dispute his pro-booster post https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-bivalent-vaccine-booster-outperforms
For a fair test of imprinting, of course, you wouldn't simultaneously boost the original response. Really you should see what happens after someone who previously had 3 poison Wuhan spike transfections has 3 poison BA.whatever transfections. Instead it's 3.5 vs .5.
Right! Or maybe, as one of the engineers of the Vax-train, he sees a nasty wreck ahead and is preparing to jump off the train in order to avoid being implicated for the wreck. LOL
Just read Topol's substack. What struck me is that all of his posts are closed to comments. Why is that? Hmmmmm......
Effectively, both. Studies lie because of publication bias. If Al-Aly had rifled through the VA data and said, "Let's highlight how mild infections don't seem to increase other healthcare uses much," he wouldn't be getting interviewed left and right. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/07/nvej-j07.html
Generally publication bias pushes for studies that "show difference" to get published so even if researchers are honest, the picture their study shows is often a lie.
How can anyone take a study seriously that still does the vaccination window shift.
By now, it is widely known that a dose of the vaccine increases your risk of getting COVID in the days after injection, but they are not counted as vaccinated and infected.
“Widely known.” No. The worry window is itself more misreading and lies on team red. I say this having a second hand anecdote of post-booster infection in family. It still is a scam.
Fenton's claims as presented in the video presentation that went viral around a year ago or earlier, were that the ONS was counting deaths with a lag. So the reason death rates in the 1st dose <21 days group were low vs unvaccinated in all age groups was that the vaccine was like a firing squad culling the vulnerable "leaders" and these deaths were being called "unvaccinated." The problem with that claim is that you should see the same piling of deaths from the second doses in the 1st dose >21 days group in early 2021. The bodies from the second dose "firing squad" have nowhere in the spreadsheet to hide. But they aren't there.
So there never was a lag, it was just due to elderly people on their death bed not being injected. As far as I can tell he is no longer claiming a lag.
The only serious attempt I have seen to substantiate the worry window is https://www.hartgroup.org/it-gets-worse-before-it-gets-better/ though there is a lot of quoting research "cross-talk" to create an impression that the worry window is some kind of known problem which I find deceptive. If I ever do a worry window post it will probably address the examples there, essentially they are all weak. Like in one it's 4.5% just-first-dosed vs 4.3% unvaccinated in nursing homes. So maybe the worry window hits 2 out of 1000 people. But probably in a younger age group that would be compensated for by staying home after the shot due to vaccine reactions.
If you ever do a worry window post, another possible idea to try is if vaccination somehow increases community transmission, perhaps by mild asymptomatic infections. People latch onto the worry window by looking at correlations in vax administration and infections, which look so convincingly clear to the eye ball. But it could be just that vaccinees who do get sick are a lot more likely to transmit it for some reason.
Btw I finally got the coof myself, no doubt 🎶XBB.1.5🎶 ... So soon I can start contributing to that negative efficacy narrative!
1) Everyone was around in the rollout and booster rush and can remember how it went for themselves. Where are the anecdotes of post-injection infection? I was binging on podcasts at the time of the rollout, none of the hosts had to call out after reporting their injection. Most people had to wait until the winter wave was subsiding (with some big differences in the timing of that thanks to the Atlantic coast and canada alpha waves.
2) A more naturalistic interpretation would be that the injections literally carried virus. You'd have the same exact problem of "well, wouldn't we see other corroboration, anecdotes etc.? Seems like that would be hard to hide." But "injected virus" doesn't fit in the overton window of "respectable claims." So all that's really happening here is that immunology is being hijacked to dress up an extreme claim as plausible.
Sorry to hear you've got the bug! Hope it's a fast and uneventful recovery.
I don't think that the virus was contained in the shots, of course. What I was arguing (perhaps not clearly due to typing on a phone) is this:
The evidence that people point to shows an increase in the case rate correlated to the rollout, and to me it does seem to exist and show up in a lot of independent locales. Let's suppose that this evidence is true and that there is some causal relationship there. All this implies is an increase in transmission - it doesn't even imply that it's vaxxed people getting sick. Small increases in transmissibility can yield large changes in case count, so if transmissibility is the variable factor, it doesn't take much to produce a striking correlation.
So, it could be that the shots increase susceptibility to a transmissible, low symptom or asymptomatic infection, that isn't that noticeable for the vaccinee (who may be experiencing similar side effects anyway), but serves to increase community transmission infecting vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. This could cause an outbreak without being particularly skewed to the vaxxed.
There is evidence to suggest that the shots reduction of symptoms leads to equal or higher viral loads, in a longer asymptomatic period; this would seem to have precisely this effect of increasing community transmission, which causes exponential increase in the case counts (and not limited to shot recipients).
So I think it's possible that the correlation evidence can be caused by the shots, without having a disproportionate effect on the people in the "worry window" - it could even be an attenuated effect via asymptomatic infections! So, the correlation evidence could be true without the "worry window" being real, at least in the way it is typically claimed to be.
Is there any reason to think the error bars on the two week window couldn't be + [two or three weeks)]/-[two (Or, hell, two or three, since this is one big happy pile of ...)]?
All I can say is that even with the first two "boosters"risk of PCR-positive-having drops immediately afterward and then balances out a bit, then drops after day 7.
This was observed both times Bar-On et al tracked results during the "mid-wave" Israel booster rollouts. So there was plenty of virus going around to reveal a worry window. Instead it seems like the just-boosted get very slightly fewer infections in week 1, but since they tend to test less in the first 3 days the tests roll in in day 4-7. Bringing risk close to even. Then risk goes down again. This is all in the supplemental figures of https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.27.21262679v1.full.pdf and was replicated for Shot 4. There will be some survivorship bias in there but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that as a reason to add a handicap.
*Edit by the way this was the study el gato malo hugely math-blundered into an alleged proof of the worry window, bluntly adding two lower rates to show a higher rate (because that's how he thinks rates work)
I think the bivalent is just too much in diminishing returns territory. The reported "severe efficacy vs no booster" I don't trust yet.
"widely known that a dose of the vaccine increases your risk of getting COVID in the days"
In contrast, what about the claim that the jabs lead to recurrence of suppressed viral infections (I think they said herpes and EBV) ? Is that also hearsay or is there something to that?
My personal intuition (arising from that ultimate source of truth in my gut) is that it ought to be easier for bugs to slip past one's immune defences while one's immune system is greatly distracted fighting something else.
as well as by our current semi-understanding of how any vaccine can influence innate immunity, such as Benn's theory that non-attenuated ones tend to be detrimental https://unglossed.substack.com/i/71561323/live-good-dead-bad which would certainly fit for these concoctions.
There was also a study showing depletion of circulating immune cells of various kinds. You would expect that, since when you want an immune response then cells go respond to it (ie migrate to site of inflammation). But if the inflammation from LNPs is overkill then the risk of short term immunodeficiency would be greater.
For all these reasons, the "worry window" is totally reasonable on paper. But the evidence isn't there. It could be just that this is due to weird biases in who decides to get injected, or behavior patterns afterward (staying home due to the vaccine being poison), but either way, less infections are observed. So at best "worry window" is an assumption contradicted by evidence, which might not mean it's wrong, but still.
Are there any studies comparing the short term immunodeficiency differences between the various vaccine platforms like the LNPs, attenuated bugs, pureed bugs, etc.?
I don't think so. As far as I can tell it's all Benn's inferences from childhood mortality in third world settings. But I do find it intuitively compelling that live vaccines are least likely to "mis-train" innate immunity
Fenton et al. didn’t, and had to back off from that claim. The reason is because a lag /misclassification in “Covid deaths” in the ONS tables would lead to easily detectable artifacts in the 1 dose <21/>21 days groups that aren’t there.
The data was in the trials. Yeah maybe they missed some tests due to incompetence but still they literally published how many recorded infections happened after the first dose. It wasn’t hidden.
As usual, I don't fully understand your article, but I wanted to suggest that comparing Pfizer to Moderna might be the way to answer questions about side effects. Pfizer and Moderna were sold to the public as being identical, and a lot of people didn't get a choice between them either. Therefore there might be no differences behaviorally or medically between recipients of Pfizer and Moderna. If there is a higher all-cause death rate among Moderna recipients then we would know that Moderna is worse than Pfizer. We wouldn't necessarily know that Moderna is worse than placebo, but it is a start.
I don't know that the data is solid enough to say for sure that the unvaxxed had higher infection rates than those who got boosted. Especially given we know that after a dose in the primary series infection rates increase in the first 2 weeks due to a temporary immune suppression. Plus we also know that not all infections are confirmed by testing and those who are unvaxxed are perhaps less likely to be tested (except during the height of mandates in late 2021)
Also, a greater number of those getting boosters were in densely populated urban areas which tend to be more liberal meaning they had a higher risk of exposure than the more vaccine resistant conservative folks living in more suburban or rural areas
I still think its a safe bet that pretty much everyone was exposed to COVID before boosting began, even those in non-urban areas
I am still open to the catch up hypothesis with better data but I do believe the vaccines are harming immune systems and increasing infections of all types, so maybe I am biased
Sigh. My head hurts. It’s becoming abundantly clear that I need an ‘Article Translator Device/App’ installed on one of my devices to turn heavy semantic domain statistical info into plain English! Otherwise known as the idiots guide to understanding the writings of Brian. 😅
Well statistics in the sense of there being tables with data in them. Anyway, I’m being slightly facetious, which is more about my struggle to comprehend the logic behind the analysis more than anything!
All good. What happened here is simply, there was a very small difference in how many unvaccinated / vaccinated housemates got infected from an infected housemate; but silly formulas made the difference seem ten times as big as what really was observed.
Unvaxxed. Still haven't gotten it, as far as I know (29yo, male. never tested). Apparently XBB.1.5 or whatever is going to infect everyone. At least that's what John Campbell said recently "It's going to infect everyone..."
However, if it's nothing more than a runny nose and minor cough, I doubt I'll ever realize it. I have a dust mite allergy (random runny nose) and I also smoke tobacco pipe (random cough).
Really, if it is nothing more than a common cold at this point, I just might want to get it. Could provide some level of immunity in case a "serious variant" mysteriously pops up, surely "from an animal reservoir" I'm sure they'll say.
Biden just lengthened the emergency. Yep, we're still in an emergency... after he said "the pandemic is over."
What is the actual non-elderly infection fatality rate now? Like 1 in a million?
I heard all the hens caught the covid flu or something and died. Now eggs are too expensive or simply not available where I live. First a pandemic among the humans and then some craziness going around in the birds. Is there any possible connection?
Given the war on meat that the climate change gang has been engaged in recently, it's not too far fetched to imagine someone releasing a bug into the wild that was intended to kill livestock. At least the wild animals will rely on natural immunity and not ceaseless mRNA injections, but the crazies are likely to keep sticking the livestock with mRNA injections ($$$$) and drag this out for ever and ever.
Thing is, does the infection catch-up in the vaxxed and boosted elderly precipitate poor health outcomes both at the time of infection and afterwards? It could certainly help explain the 16% rise in UK disabled which doesn't seem to have affected the working age population so much.
This paper from Maxime Taquet a while back suggests that long covid outcomes are similar for breakthough infections:
Now he rightly points out that vaxx reduces the risk of infection in the first place, but if all it does is displace it sometime into the future, what happens then?
Edited to add:
Seems that other papers back this up, eg this one from Ziyad Al-Aly et al:
It concludes 'Altogether, the findings suggest that vaccination before infection confers only partial protection in the post-acute phase of the disease...'
Next question is, how does a dollop of IGg4 tolerance play into this?
Since Long Covid can follow mild infection, I don't tend to think the injections improve anything here. Or might worsen via tolerance, or do some mix of the two. The latest LC study from Israel finds no efficacy (less shortness of breath, but more cognitive impairment) https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj-2022-072529
As far as severe efficacy, I still think it's real, but by definition can't benefit 95-100% of recipients per age. They would have been fine on that front.
My 'strategy' for delta was to allow infection in the summer when vit D levels are high and the health service wasn't too stressed, just in case. It worked out fine, helped by plenty of moderate exercise beforehand which can improve outcomes by 2x and more.
Once infected and being low risk, it was better to lose the masks asap and just let nature boost immunity when it wants to. 🙂
If we assume that your claim that a lot of people have not actually been infected by SARS-CoV-2 or one of its many scariants which is driving the increase in infections among the vaxxed and boosted to the hilt crowd, then ...
It could be that the excess mortality is a result of those people, especially the older ones dying from those infections. After all, even rhinoviruses can kill older people and those with a weak immune system.
How would we determine whether any excess mortality is a result of SARS-CoV-2's spike protein (and it's many scariants) or as a result of the enormous numbers of Spike proteins caused by the #ClotShot or because they watched too much TV about how dangerous the scariants are and just up and died suddenly?
So, when it comes to the UK after the ONS stopped publishing updates, that's the big question. Actually I guess I could slog over to the UKHSA and see if there's anything in there for "Covid deaths." Been a while since I looked.
Based on the early PCR tests having the cycle thresholds cranked way up it seems likely that the cases back then were way overstated, which lends credence to your claims that not many were actually infected.
I dunno whether I have ever posted this before as well: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100307215534.htm
However, it is known that many in the West (and probably elsewhere) are vitamin D deficient, and so they probably could not mount an immune defense even if boosted to the moon.
How can we estimate how many of those 'cases' were real cases. Should we just assume that only 10% were?
I don't think the cases were inflated. You've got 102 million for the official US count, so still way less than the whole population - I think that's an undercount. And both the Cleveland Clinic studies have shown that people who previously PCR+ with the cycles set to whatever they have been from 2020 to present, are the ones least likely to PCR+ going forward. So there are no or very few false positives in those studies. Having a PCR+ can't confer a property of being less likely to PCR+ if was just a false positive in the first place.
So, the original definition of a case was someone with symptoms.
With inflated cycle threshold counts, how many of those with a PCR+ were actually a case instead of someone who was challenged with the virus but fought it off?
Having said that however, given that there is evidence that the majority of people in the West are D3 insufficient ... perhaps 50+ percent were actually cases.
I guess the question is: How many of those tested actually had symptoms.
We will probably never know.
'readers better appraised of reality'
That should probably be 'apprised'.
English has too many damn words anyway. All we need are grunts.
"Appraise and apprise are often confused because writers don't know about apprise."
-exactly me before two minutes ago
Am I understanding this correctly. What you are suggesting is that the effect may well be that large numbers of the vaccinated had not actually been exposed to whatever scariant of concern they were looking at prior to being vaccinated, and so the effect could simply be that they did not have immunity.
I do not know if I have ever had any of the scariants because I have never bothered being tested and I have never had the ClotShots either.
That's likely true for lots of people. In the BA.5 summer survey paper even among people who self-selected to take a survey, reported previous infections were middling. Probably because of regardless of injection status there is a contingent that will never test, like me as well.
The Peters "Died Suddenly" feels like controlled opposition with an attempt at Google washing the results. Ha
The MSM avoiding the topic while scientists are desperately (sub or consciously) trying to cover their asses by finding an excuse (long covid) that reduce their shame in pushing these untested products on 5 billion people.
I seem to rememeber in 2020, all strokes, clots, and heart attacks were all covid related. Haven't looked back at that Fear Porn data but that was my first "ohhhh wait a minute moment."
Thanks again Brian for the stimulating chat!
So the reason the MSM has been pushing so many explanations for these sudden deaths and health issues other than long covid, being it looks bad for the vaccines that were supposed to stop infection, then at least reduce symtpoms, and final Hail Mary of reducing Long Covid?
Even living in what appears to be a Post Modernist hellscape with "truth teams", blaming Long Covid (which has yet to be defined, has overlap with vaccine injuries, probably related to that pesky spike protein factory called your internal organs) seems like what the Blue Team? would be using as cover, but doesnt appear to be what is being done from keeping an eye on the MSM garbage. Maybe this is a product of Big Pharma advertising dollars or they are just waiting for the "Long Covid vaccine"? Pfizer has that new heart tissue repair mrna vaccine coming out.......
I admit I dont follow the Long Covid studies. Maybe its just my take on the world, but studies relating to pharmaceutical products tend to get their funding from sources with incentives to get results that paint their industry in the best light. They have their conclusions, just gotta design that study. If it doesnt work out, bury it.
My friend works for DOD contractor who won a bid proposal to use machine learning with a prepared NIH dataset. They were told to design a model that will show the covid vaccines reduce long covid. The company with the best model that shows less long covid with the vaccinated, will win more funding and continue the project.
Some people will never believe these vaccines are dangerous and a terrible idea no matter what studies are published.
Demanding receipts is good. People will still be told not to believe their lying eyes.
Sorry Brian! After 3 years, I am experiencing peak skepticism.
I mean I do think the MSM bit is some sort of op. But I wonder if it's just a float to try to gauge response. Exactly as Peters' "Died Suddenly" might have been. The MSM and our reality TV governments have certainly gone quiet on the Long Covid issue but medical media hypes it a lot. Studies hype it a lot. This lady blames a child's stroke on the virus https://twitter.com/CorinneMeadow20/status/1613959110575226880 and cites https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887899422002107 which doesn't even show an increase in strokes vs trend in the "pandemic" era (cuts off right before teen vaccine rollout, conveniently)
Hmm....after reading so many of your Substacks, "Statistics Lie" and all that....I wonder why even bother with this? Just seem to be explaining away results of anything and everything.
As for "Everything is catch up effect", out of all the people I know and have discussed this with (lets say 100 people),
I can name maybe 3 people who didnt already have covid before their initial booster. They mostly likely had covid before but didnt test (many of my vaccinated friends in 2021 believed they couldn't get covid so no need to test) or had been hiding in their homes and had no children.
Max anecdote is friend with 5 doses and had covid 4 times.
Maybe I am missing something here.
Meanwhile I have witnessed two heart attacks in college age vaccinated men during cycling races. Two vaccinated friends parents have died from heart attacks. My other friends dad had to get pace maker installed after arythmia with no history of heart disease. Step mothers thyroid has completey shutdown and now needs an MRI for some other unknown issue. I could go on and on and on.
Not a single unvaccinated friend or family member has had any new health issues pop up in past 3 yrs after having covid including my mother who had just recovered from breast cancer 6 months before contracting original covid strain early 2020.
Find me that vaccinated vs unvaccinated study for this vaccine or any vaccine for that matter and maybe it would be clear. Apparently those statistics would be lies as well?
When suddenly all these deaths and medical issues are being blamed on global warming, cold weather, hot weather, holiday heart, referee whistles, indoor gas stoves, tylenol, and NOT covid or long covid, you know we are over the target.
And yet here were these households in the Netherlands surveyed during Delta and BA.1 in which the injected tested positive less. And surveys are closer to anecdotes, which I like to base my picture of reality on. So there's anecdotes in both directions as far as counts of infections.
Humans basically form groups and share perspective and come up with a "bid" on what strategies and policies should be tried. Good, great. I think "a new study says X!" is basically a mind-virus that breaks this process down. So I think spreading cynicism about "a new study says" is an end in itself. Ok, you are telling me about a study, did you actually look at the details. Demand receipts.
I find your health downturn anecdotes plausible. I do believe the injections are maiming and killing even if the statistics don't reflect it yet. I don't think there is a "we" that's over the target. The "Long Covid kills" team is deeply deeply convinced. They have a "new study says X" for that belief every day of the week.
I know people injured and killed by the shots, maybe 15, of whom only one of my sisters reported it to VAERS. But among my circle of friends and family, most of whom are vaxxed, I'm not seeing multiple covid infections. By now they've all caught up with us unvaxxed: this happened last summer, so, omicron catch up. But only my unvaxxed husband, eldest son and self have had it more than once. If all I had were my own data, I wouldn't be able to say the shots caused worse susceptibility to infection and symptomatic covid. But the side effects, that's a different story.
Fwiw Berenson's piece left me dazed.
Dazed how? I thought it was nice to have confirmation of misclassification, though not surprising. He misses the result of synthesizing negative real time infection efficacy with apparent equal representation in "Covid hospitalizations" (if the vaxxed are getting all their catchup infections right now then it wouldn't really mean anything if "Covid hospitalizations" were disproportionately vaccinated).
The sloppy categorization of the data bothered me. It seemed like a pile of God-knows-what that could lead to any conclusion. Irritated the hell out of me.
Oh, agree as far as that. Like all the stuff about "look at these disappearing Canada stats" turns me away for the same reason. I don't want to see literal data dadaism.
Good stuff, as usual, Brian.
I've been reading and analyzing your recent "catch-up effect" posts. Based upon the studies you've analyzed and the arguments you've made, I'm convinced of what you're saying (by in large). However, it does seem that the vaccines do have some sort of "negative efficacy," especially among the boostered. And the evidence for that is my anecdotal observations: the vaccinated (many of whom previously had Covid) are the ones who got really sick during these past few variant waves over the past few months; whereas the unvaccinated have been fine (worse case scenario: scratchy throat or slight congestion).
In other words, there is no "catch-up effect" going on with the vaccinated I know: not only did Covid already get them, it got them a second (or third) time. What is more, the severity of their subsequent infection was worse than the first time.
In short, your "catch-up effect" theory/model makes sense and is likely to be valid. Yet, it's not comporting with what I'm seeing in my circles.
I definitely suspect the vaxxed are having exacerbated infections. Like both the teacher and the "Long Omicron" guy in my Tolerance Maims post.
For raw negative infection efficacy I see a lot of anecdotes in both directions in substack comments (eg, unvaccinated with 2nd Omicrons, though very rarely).
One thing to be aware of is that Omicron increased "breakthrough reinfections" two different ways: by causing reinfections, and by increasing first "breakthrough" infections. So definitely the trend will be up. But that might not speak to whether both unvaxxed and vaxxed are equally naturally immune (ie have had Omi once yet), I think it's still not balanced.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.03.22284042v1 shows repeat-positives in N3C, which is the closest thing to a decent monitoring system in the US, using a 60-day window instead of the usual 90. So you can see (Fig 1) that there's some "Omicron reinfections" (green and lavender) in there, but nothing crazy compared to the initial spike (which is a good yardstick to account for whatever the underreporting factor is).
Out of 1.6 million initial positives there's only 2176 double-re-positives (supplemental). Though URF is unknowable. Vaccine status isn't given but Blacks are overrepresented in reinfections and reinfections + hospitalization. Asians not. Seems nonsuggestive of negative infection efficacy.
Right. But as the authors admit, one of said study's limitations is that it did not (because it was infeasible to) include home tests. Consequently, the number of reinfections may be (likely are) much higher.
My case illustrates that limitation. I (unvaxxed) had omicron last January (tested positive with home test). This past August-October, many of my vaxxed friends and coworkers were really sick with Covid (most for the second time). After frequently being exposed to them, I experienced some slight congestion and felt a little "off," but nothing that bothered me--something that, prior to 2020, I wouldn't even have paid any attention to. For shits and giggles, I took a home covid test: it was positive. So, apparently, I had a reinfection, but had I never taken the test, I never would have known I had an infection. Or, perhaps it wasn't an infection: I simply had the antigen showing up in my nostril, but my immune system kept it from advancing to an infection?
Which raises the question (or point) I'm trying to get at: how can we accurately determine efficacy (whether negative or positive) when we can't accurately know the true number of reinfections (because people are taking home tests or not even testing at all). That's why I keep come back to the need to add some sort of caveat to your "catch-up-effect" model. While it is probably correct and viable, there seems to be some sort of negative efficacy effect also going on, which cannot be captured in or modeled from the data, where the vaccinated, who previously had covid, are not as well as the unvaccinated who previously had covid.
I am sure antigen testing increased URF - but it also might have increased (unmeasured) "testing," so it could be a bit of a wash. What I propose regarding Hadley, et al. is that Omicron created a pool of first-timers roughly as big as all previous first-timers (though this isn't broken down in the study), so if there were no Omicron immunity then green should resemble the other colors in AUC, given that those others colors are already a product of whatever the URF for reinfection is. But yes, certainly a dramatic increase in N3C's URF because of the at-home era is possible. So we can't be sure.
At the same time, it is not the only system that has failed to detect reinfections (regardless of vax status). It's one more broken banjo in the symphony.
"It's one more broken banjo in the symphony."
LOL! That pretty much sums it up. I'm on board with what you're saying.
A bit off topic, but in case you haven't yet seen this, Paul Offit thinks "imprinting" is why the bivalent vaccines aren't increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780
"The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2."
Appreciate the work you do and your interaction with all of us. Hope the pinky heals up.
Oh yes - but funnily, he hinges that on the two earliest neutralization papers which haven't been consistently replicated. So either he wrote that back in October and it's just now being published, or he is cherry-picking (it's very weird that he's been so anti-booster given his background as America's number one vax hawk, but maybe he had a bad reaction and this is his lame way of changing heart). I am going to briefly mention Topol's review of the results when I dispute his pro-booster post https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-bivalent-vaccine-booster-outperforms
For a fair test of imprinting, of course, you wouldn't simultaneously boost the original response. Really you should see what happens after someone who previously had 3 poison Wuhan spike transfections has 3 poison BA.whatever transfections. Instead it's 3.5 vs .5.
Right! Or maybe, as one of the engineers of the Vax-train, he sees a nasty wreck ahead and is preparing to jump off the train in order to avoid being implicated for the wreck. LOL
Just read Topol's substack. What struck me is that all of his posts are closed to comments. Why is that? Hmmmmm......
I think you have a typo here: "The reason I am careful with these kind of small details is that studies lie."
Did you mean "statistics lie" instead of "studies lie" ?
Effectively, both. Studies lie because of publication bias. If Al-Aly had rifled through the VA data and said, "Let's highlight how mild infections don't seem to increase other healthcare uses much," he wouldn't be getting interviewed left and right. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/07/nvej-j07.html
Generally publication bias pushes for studies that "show difference" to get published so even if researchers are honest, the picture their study shows is often a lie.
How can anyone take a study seriously that still does the vaccination window shift.
By now, it is widely known that a dose of the vaccine increases your risk of getting COVID in the days after injection, but they are not counted as vaccinated and infected.
“Widely known.” No. The worry window is itself more misreading and lies on team red. I say this having a second hand anecdote of post-booster infection in family. It still is a scam.
Did you expand on that criticism of Fenton a.o. seemingly well documented claim (as far as i recall) somewhere?
Fenton's claims as presented in the video presentation that went viral around a year ago or earlier, were that the ONS was counting deaths with a lag. So the reason death rates in the 1st dose <21 days group were low vs unvaccinated in all age groups was that the vaccine was like a firing squad culling the vulnerable "leaders" and these deaths were being called "unvaccinated." The problem with that claim is that you should see the same piling of deaths from the second doses in the 1st dose >21 days group in early 2021. The bodies from the second dose "firing squad" have nowhere in the spreadsheet to hide. But they aren't there.
So there never was a lag, it was just due to elderly people on their death bed not being injected. As far as I can tell he is no longer claiming a lag.
The only serious attempt I have seen to substantiate the worry window is https://www.hartgroup.org/it-gets-worse-before-it-gets-better/ though there is a lot of quoting research "cross-talk" to create an impression that the worry window is some kind of known problem which I find deceptive. If I ever do a worry window post it will probably address the examples there, essentially they are all weak. Like in one it's 4.5% just-first-dosed vs 4.3% unvaccinated in nursing homes. So maybe the worry window hits 2 out of 1000 people. But probably in a younger age group that would be compensated for by staying home after the shot due to vaccine reactions.
If you ever do a worry window post, another possible idea to try is if vaccination somehow increases community transmission, perhaps by mild asymptomatic infections. People latch onto the worry window by looking at correlations in vax administration and infections, which look so convincingly clear to the eye ball. But it could be just that vaccinees who do get sick are a lot more likely to transmit it for some reason.
Btw I finally got the coof myself, no doubt 🎶XBB.1.5🎶 ... So soon I can start contributing to that negative efficacy narrative!
My problem with the eyeball argument is,
1) Everyone was around in the rollout and booster rush and can remember how it went for themselves. Where are the anecdotes of post-injection infection? I was binging on podcasts at the time of the rollout, none of the hosts had to call out after reporting their injection. Most people had to wait until the winter wave was subsiding (with some big differences in the timing of that thanks to the Atlantic coast and canada alpha waves.
2) A more naturalistic interpretation would be that the injections literally carried virus. You'd have the same exact problem of "well, wouldn't we see other corroboration, anecdotes etc.? Seems like that would be hard to hide." But "injected virus" doesn't fit in the overton window of "respectable claims." So all that's really happening here is that immunology is being hijacked to dress up an extreme claim as plausible.
Sorry to hear you've got the bug! Hope it's a fast and uneventful recovery.
I don't think that the virus was contained in the shots, of course. What I was arguing (perhaps not clearly due to typing on a phone) is this:
The evidence that people point to shows an increase in the case rate correlated to the rollout, and to me it does seem to exist and show up in a lot of independent locales. Let's suppose that this evidence is true and that there is some causal relationship there. All this implies is an increase in transmission - it doesn't even imply that it's vaxxed people getting sick. Small increases in transmissibility can yield large changes in case count, so if transmissibility is the variable factor, it doesn't take much to produce a striking correlation.
So, it could be that the shots increase susceptibility to a transmissible, low symptom or asymptomatic infection, that isn't that noticeable for the vaccinee (who may be experiencing similar side effects anyway), but serves to increase community transmission infecting vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. This could cause an outbreak without being particularly skewed to the vaxxed.
There is evidence to suggest that the shots reduction of symptoms leads to equal or higher viral loads, in a longer asymptomatic period; this would seem to have precisely this effect of increasing community transmission, which causes exponential increase in the case counts (and not limited to shot recipients).
So I think it's possible that the correlation evidence can be caused by the shots, without having a disproportionate effect on the people in the "worry window" - it could even be an attenuated effect via asymptomatic infections! So, the correlation evidence could be true without the "worry window" being real, at least in the way it is typically claimed to be.
And then, Rochelle Walensky, wasn't her infection just after a booster? In the "window"? Hate to tell you how much I enjoyed that.
Was one month after https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/the-cdc-director-just-got-covid-she , so it would have been counted as a post-booster infection in any study, not missed in the "window."
And then Califf as well. Maybe 2 months for him?
But there were anecdotes for faster vax failure in that one WaPo comments section I trawled https://unglossed.substack.com/i/77065722/weeks-to-bivalent-failure
Is there any reason to think the error bars on the two week window couldn't be + [two or three weeks)]/-[two (Or, hell, two or three, since this is one big happy pile of ...)]?
All I can say is that even with the first two "boosters"risk of PCR-positive-having drops immediately afterward and then balances out a bit, then drops after day 7.
This was observed both times Bar-On et al tracked results during the "mid-wave" Israel booster rollouts. So there was plenty of virus going around to reveal a worry window. Instead it seems like the just-boosted get very slightly fewer infections in week 1, but since they tend to test less in the first 3 days the tests roll in in day 4-7. Bringing risk close to even. Then risk goes down again. This is all in the supplemental figures of https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.27.21262679v1.full.pdf and was replicated for Shot 4. There will be some survivorship bias in there but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that as a reason to add a handicap.
*Edit by the way this was the study el gato malo hugely math-blundered into an alleged proof of the worry window, bluntly adding two lower rates to show a higher rate (because that's how he thinks rates work)
I think the bivalent is just too much in diminishing returns territory. The reported "severe efficacy vs no booster" I don't trust yet.
Thanks Brian.
"widely known that a dose of the vaccine increases your risk of getting COVID in the days"
In contrast, what about the claim that the jabs lead to recurrence of suppressed viral infections (I think they said herpes and EBV) ? Is that also hearsay or is there something to that?
My personal intuition (arising from that ultimate source of truth in my gut) is that it ought to be easier for bugs to slip past one's immune defences while one's immune system is greatly distracted fighting something else.
Yes, that one seems well-supported by adverse event reporting and the study where spike was directly in the zoster lesion https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cia2.12278
as well as by our current semi-understanding of how any vaccine can influence innate immunity, such as Benn's theory that non-attenuated ones tend to be detrimental https://unglossed.substack.com/i/71561323/live-good-dead-bad which would certainly fit for these concoctions.
There was also a study showing depletion of circulating immune cells of various kinds. You would expect that, since when you want an immune response then cells go respond to it (ie migrate to site of inflammation). But if the inflammation from LNPs is overkill then the risk of short term immunodeficiency would be greater.
For all these reasons, the "worry window" is totally reasonable on paper. But the evidence isn't there. It could be just that this is due to weird biases in who decides to get injected, or behavior patterns afterward (staying home due to the vaccine being poison), but either way, less infections are observed. So at best "worry window" is an assumption contradicted by evidence, which might not mean it's wrong, but still.
Are there any studies comparing the short term immunodeficiency differences between the various vaccine platforms like the LNPs, attenuated bugs, pureed bugs, etc.?
I don't think so. As far as I can tell it's all Benn's inferences from childhood mortality in third world settings. But I do find it intuitively compelling that live vaccines are least likely to "mis-train" innate immunity
Sir, your response time on comments is unbelievable. Are you chatGPT in disguise?
I don't think the worry window is a scam, it is just hard to get data on it.
The only data I know available is the Israeli data and this: https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/epi/covid-19-epi-confirmed-cases-following-vaccination-ltchrh.pdf?sc_lang=en ,Fig 4 page 7/19
And didn't Norman Fenton et. al proof that you can manipulate the vaccine efficacy even with a placebo and the shift of full protection?
Fenton et al. didn’t, and had to back off from that claim. The reason is because a lag /misclassification in “Covid deaths” in the ONS tables would lead to easily detectable artifacts in the 1 dose <21/>21 days groups that aren’t there.
The data was in the trials. Yeah maybe they missed some tests due to incompetence but still they literally published how many recorded infections happened after the first dose. It wasn’t hidden.
Daaaaaamn son. I'm taking my Fisher-Price basketball hoop and unsubscribing.
(just kidding I'm not)
As usual, I don't fully understand your article, but I wanted to suggest that comparing Pfizer to Moderna might be the way to answer questions about side effects. Pfizer and Moderna were sold to the public as being identical, and a lot of people didn't get a choice between them either. Therefore there might be no differences behaviorally or medically between recipients of Pfizer and Moderna. If there is a higher all-cause death rate among Moderna recipients then we would know that Moderna is worse than Pfizer. We wouldn't necessarily know that Moderna is worse than placebo, but it is a start.
All I can say is that I am pleased when I read that the boosted are being hospitalized and dying from Covid.
I get to indulge my Inner Shad.
I don't know that the data is solid enough to say for sure that the unvaxxed had higher infection rates than those who got boosted. Especially given we know that after a dose in the primary series infection rates increase in the first 2 weeks due to a temporary immune suppression. Plus we also know that not all infections are confirmed by testing and those who are unvaxxed are perhaps less likely to be tested (except during the height of mandates in late 2021)
Also, a greater number of those getting boosters were in densely populated urban areas which tend to be more liberal meaning they had a higher risk of exposure than the more vaccine resistant conservative folks living in more suburban or rural areas
I still think its a safe bet that pretty much everyone was exposed to COVID before boosting began, even those in non-urban areas
I am still open to the catch up hypothesis with better data but I do believe the vaccines are harming immune systems and increasing infections of all types, so maybe I am biased
Worry window doesn’t exist
Sigh. My head hurts. It’s becoming abundantly clear that I need an ‘Article Translator Device/App’ installed on one of my devices to turn heavy semantic domain statistical info into plain English! Otherwise known as the idiots guide to understanding the writings of Brian. 😅
There's no statistics in my analysis. Just: how many infections, when.
Well statistics in the sense of there being tables with data in them. Anyway, I’m being slightly facetious, which is more about my struggle to comprehend the logic behind the analysis more than anything!
All good. What happened here is simply, there was a very small difference in how many unvaccinated / vaccinated housemates got infected from an infected housemate; but silly formulas made the difference seem ten times as big as what really was observed.
Unvaxxed. Still haven't gotten it, as far as I know (29yo, male. never tested). Apparently XBB.1.5 or whatever is going to infect everyone. At least that's what John Campbell said recently "It's going to infect everyone..."
However, if it's nothing more than a runny nose and minor cough, I doubt I'll ever realize it. I have a dust mite allergy (random runny nose) and I also smoke tobacco pipe (random cough).
Really, if it is nothing more than a common cold at this point, I just might want to get it. Could provide some level of immunity in case a "serious variant" mysteriously pops up, surely "from an animal reservoir" I'm sure they'll say.
Biden just lengthened the emergency. Yep, we're still in an emergency... after he said "the pandemic is over."
What is the actual non-elderly infection fatality rate now? Like 1 in a million?
Here in California, the Animal Reservoirs are back up to 82% thanks to the recent Animalspheric Rivers
I heard all the hens caught the covid flu or something and died. Now eggs are too expensive or simply not available where I live. First a pandemic among the humans and then some craziness going around in the birds. Is there any possible connection?
"hens caught the covid flu or something"
That'd be bird flu, which can be actually serious. But they'll just euthanize an entire flock if they think there's any chance even one has it.
I am a bit suspicious if they are killing more birds than are really affected. But in general the reason we have record avian flu outbreaks is probably because we keep raising and eating more and more birds, globally https://unglossed.substack.com/i/67957289/resource-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-outbreaks
OTOH what is weird about this year is a lot of wild birds are dying, HPAIs don't usually affect them because that version of the virus likes confined spaces. https://hakaimagazine.com/news/the-rampaging-avian-influenza-is-entering-unknown-territory/
Maybe it's both; a secret conspiracy to make markets more dependent on chicken + cause shortages with intentionally released flus. You never know.
Given the war on meat that the climate change gang has been engaged in recently, it's not too far fetched to imagine someone releasing a bug into the wild that was intended to kill livestock. At least the wild animals will rely on natural immunity and not ceaseless mRNA injections, but the crazies are likely to keep sticking the livestock with mRNA injections ($$$$) and drag this out for ever and ever.
I hope I am totally wrong. I like the birds.
That was a story element in an unfinished novel I was working on in 2011. Was the beginning of my research into virus/immunity stuff.
The virus is basically that furniture store with the radio ads
Thing is, does the infection catch-up in the vaxxed and boosted elderly precipitate poor health outcomes both at the time of infection and afterwards? It could certainly help explain the 16% rise in UK disabled which doesn't seem to have affected the working age population so much.
This paper from Maxime Taquet a while back suggests that long covid outcomes are similar for breakthough infections:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9013695/
Now he rightly points out that vaxx reduces the risk of infection in the first place, but if all it does is displace it sometime into the future, what happens then?
Edited to add:
Seems that other papers back this up, eg this one from Ziyad Al-Aly et al:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01840-0
It concludes 'Altogether, the findings suggest that vaccination before infection confers only partial protection in the post-acute phase of the disease...'
Next question is, how does a dollop of IGg4 tolerance play into this?
Since Long Covid can follow mild infection, I don't tend to think the injections improve anything here. Or might worsen via tolerance, or do some mix of the two. The latest LC study from Israel finds no efficacy (less shortness of breath, but more cognitive impairment) https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj-2022-072529
As far as severe efficacy, I still think it's real, but by definition can't benefit 95-100% of recipients per age. They would have been fine on that front.
So why put off infection. Life's too short.
"Long Covid can follow mild infection"
Is Long Covid still happening with people from omicron? Like, to any serious degree? In the young, healthy, and unvaxxed?
Well, 350 days after my unvaccinated presumed Omicron infection, I broke my pinky. So there's that.
Good enough!
My 'strategy' for delta was to allow infection in the summer when vit D levels are high and the health service wasn't too stressed, just in case. It worked out fine, helped by plenty of moderate exercise beforehand which can improve outcomes by 2x and more.
Once infected and being low risk, it was better to lose the masks asap and just let nature boost immunity when it wants to. 🙂